


Idylls of Ernest

by fresne



Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Genre: Cat2, Gen, Literature, Yuletide 2013, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 22:44:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1099452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Ernest could not stand not knowing another moment more, he opened the trunk of his brother's things. He prayed for hope at the bottom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Idylls of Ernest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foxy11814](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxy11814/gifts).



When Ernest could not stand not knowing another moment more, he opened the trunk of his brother's things. It had been stored in the attic of the old house that echoed silently with so many happier memories.

He had not been able to make himself go to the house for months. It felt like years. It felt like a forever of grief finally beginning to thaw from winter. The brass bound trunk was covered in grey dust. He said to the brass and black of the battered trunk, "Why did you leave?"

To have lost so much so close on each other: little William, Justine, Clerval, Elizabeth, and their Father. Any would have been a terrible blow. To lose all and have Victor disappear was an avalanche. He asked the trunk again, "Why did you leave? Where did you go?"

The trunk did not answer. It sat in perfect silence and dust. Its answers were inside. He prayed that hope was inside and not all the ills of the world. Surely the world was already full of enough ill. He could use some hope.

Ernest breathed in and breathed out. He almost choked on the cold sour air of the attic and tried to laugh at himself, but could not. Finally after a geologic age, he opened the trunk with a hard creak. He sat down on the dusty floor. He went through piles of papers. He could not believe what he was reading. He'd have thought it was the ravings of a madman, but Victor had shone so brightly. So brilliantly. Like a star racing across the night sky. If anyone could accomplish such a thing, it would be his brother.

Ernest read of the hideous creature and looked at the drawings Victor had made. He traced the lines of what he must consider his nephew. The one who had murdered his family one by one. Though Victor must share in that blame. Justine might still have lived had he but spoken. Father perhaps, but these were meaningless thoughts. Purposeless. These were might have beens.

Ernest had always been fond of Arthurian tales, so he gazed upon the picture and thought, "This was my family's Mordred. Would it have gone like this had Victor embraced his bastard child?" He was not hideous. Hugely wrought it was true, but only Victor's perfectionism could call this face hideous. 

Those too were meaningless thoughts. They were without purpose. What had been done was done. The dead could not come back through thinking them.

He closed the box and its secrets. He took only the picture of the creature on the verge of life. He placed it in a picture frame with that of Victor's. 

With no one to tell him not to, he set off upon Victor's trail. It was slow. Ernest was not a detective, but still, Victor blazed for any who met him. Ernest made it as far as a nameless wide spot of a village in Russia, where the trail did not so much stop as fall off the map. He gazed at the wide sea and knew that his journey had ended in not a triumph, but a whimper. There was no Holy Grail to find. There was only a cold sea that stretched beyond where he could within reason go.

He turned back and decided to cross overland towards Moscow. It was summer yet and the days were infinite. 

It was while making camp in the midst of miles of nothing that he saw his nephew. From a distance, watching him. He called out, "Come by the fire."

His nephew watched silently from the distance and disappeared into the endless sunshine.

Ernest knew that he was watched the next day. He left behind a picture book full of Arthurian stories. It was bright and colorful. Possibly far less than the creature's scope if indeed he had learned to read with Werther, Paradise Lost and Empires. Still, it had been Ernest's when he was a boy and he'd filled the margins with dreams and drawings. It was a book filled with so much hope.

When he woke from his daylit sleep the next day, he found it carefully balanced next to the smouldering coals. He wrote a note in it this time, "I'm giving this to you. Your Uncle Ernest."

It was returned the next day at the next campsite with a note in return. "I am a wretch and the destruction of your family. I do not deserve anything. I cannot die and I cannot live."

Ernest smiled, because that note was such pure Victor. He wrote in return. "Our family's destruction it is true. I suspect that you and I are all that is left of it. Mordred you have been to our family. Still, I am giving you this book. When you have understood it, then come to visit me, and tell me of my Brother, your Father's, ultimate fate."

Ernest arrived in Moscow the next day.

He traveled by the coach road then and there were no more exchanges of letters or books. But when he arrived home in Geneva, his book was waiting for him propped up against the door. There was a long letter describing his brother's final days. It made for hard reading, but Ernest read every word two times.

Ernest pulled out _Morte D'Arthur_ and left it on the porch in exchange. He left a note full of his thoughts and dreams and hopes and fears and grief. He had that too. There in his house with the days growing shorter into the dark of the year and the echoes of happier times.

A week later they exchange _Morte D'Arthur_ for _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_. He left a note full of his thought to spend the winter on a Greek island far from snow. Where the blue water sparkled and the sand was white and the days warm.

The next day, he received Gawain back with a page marked with a green ribbon. He smiled and packed his bags and books for the trip.

**Author's Note:**

> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.


End file.
